How Difficult is it to Find Food in the Forest?

In April I released a video where the challenge was to catch a fish with improvised materials. I ended up fashioning a hook from bone that I found in the forest and making an improvised fishing line. However it became apparent that if this was a real survival situation I likely would have perished. It took me more than three days to actually catch a fish. What would have been better is whilst I was figuring out how to find protein I managed to find sustenance in the forest by foraging. So in this video I thought I'd give it a go. Is it possible to find a day's worth of food in the forest? All right here's the script. I'm in the woods evidently and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to walk around and using my intuition just pick plants that I think look edible. Let's see where that gets us. This is day one hour zero. Admittedly I'm being deliberately obtuse here but I wanted to see what I would end up with foraging just based on intuition and my limited knowledge of plant life around me. Would I be able to get a meal or would I pick something toxic? These plants here have little thorns on them. Yep that's spiky so I'm going to avoid that. This plant here leafy juicy looking stems that looks a lot more edible. I'm just going to take the whole thing. Wow that came up easy. This is one plant I definitely do know and that's nettles. I do know about nettle soup that is something that people make that's something that people eat which means that nettles must be edible. Stinging me. These big stems look at the size of these. Doesn't smell like food. Smells like a plant but looks like mint. It doesn't smell like mint. It's definitely not mint. This sort of fungus growing on the end I don't know if it's edible or not but. These are buttercups which surely are fine. This video has two main purposes. One is to be entertaining and somewhat educational and the other one is to encourage you to try foraging. It's really fun. However you should be aware that before I put anything in my mouth in this video it has been checked by a foraging expert. Do not eat something that you find in the forest without the guidance of someone qualified and don't use this video as reference material that is not its intended purpose. No really don't. Anyway on with the video. So here's my smorgasbord of 12 different plant species. What we're going to do is just eat these and just see what happens. So unidentified mushroom species. Here goes. Just kidding. That would be super dumb. Instead I had foraging and bushcraft expert Adam Logan have a look at what I had collected. Wow it's quite the spread. Okay. At first it looked like I might have actually picked up a decent lunch. Dandelion really is up there as one of the good ones to forage. So the whole plant is safe for human consumption. Nettle is always mentioned as a good forager's plant to pick. You've actually managed to pick a very very good edible in here. Ground elder. So this really you could see is forming you know a side of greens in your meal quite easily. However it soon became apparent things were not so good after all. These greens are going to be quite low on the calorie side of things. So you've correctly identified or picked a safe plant but not taken the part that has the real food value. Actually they're very bitter. You can have all sorts of reactions. Death is probably the main one. They're actually quite poisonous. It's very very bitter. One of these plants is a definite avoid. It's one of the toxic ones. Unfortunately this is one of our most toxic plants. Not a mistake you want to make. Out of everything I think you've picked today this is potentially the biggest error and potentially the most dangerous. So this is one of our most toxic plant species in the UK. Suppress your heart rate and yeah send you out pretty quickly if you ate enough of it. Not only had I chosen food that was low in calories I'd also picked a plethora of inedible harmful and downright deadly plants. Separating what was safe to eat I sat down for a rather sparse lunch. You try that. Just because it doesn't kill you doesn't mean you can eat it. Okay. Seems insane to eat nettles. Hey that's that's all right. Just eating weeds that grow around the back of the house now. Nah. Wouldn't recommend. I just found this over there. Today in true British fashion it's pissing and rain so I'm not going to do any foraging today. Instead I'm going to do some learning. So normally on this channel I learn from trial and error. However in this scenario that would be really really dumb. That would be a surefire way to get yourself killed. Humans over generations have passed down knowledge for how to forage in the forest safely by word of mouth and today we do that in a more modern way using books. So I'm going to do some reading up. Learning about foraging and the plants around you is really interesting. It's crazy to think this stuff just grows around you for free and you can just go and eat it. I didn't know there was so many different kinds of dandelion. 20% of the dry weight of the nettle's leaf is protein. A little bit of fat in there as well. Vitamin C, Vitamin A, Calcium, Potassium, Iron, Phosphorus, Magnesium. I really recommend trying it out with an expert guide or taking a course of which there are many. It's a really wholesome thing to do. What I needed to do was find food that would be easily identifiable, easy to forage and would provide plenty of calories. This meant fungi was out. Too easy to mix up the species and the risks of getting it wrong were just too high. I focused on finding just five different plant species that would provide a full day's worth of nutrition and would be easy to find. So burdock, the plant where I harvested the leaves, it has big tuber-like roots below it. Wild garlic. This is what I'm looking for. Quite unmistakable which is perfect for me. So apparently they're quite smelly. Leaves are broader than all other garlics. The next day with better weather, I set out again. This time armed with some knowledge. I'm really looking for three plants in particular here that will give me a lot of calories. Those are burdock, pig nut and wild garlic. Those plants all have tubers that I can harvest and hopefully they contain a lot of calories. Now that I knew about their distinguishing features, it was surprisingly easy to find and identify the plant species I was after. The grand elder has this u-shaped stem. We've got these weird asymmetric leaves. These are safe to eat and apparently very good for you. Okay so this is wild garlic. I can tell because of the flowers but also even from here I can smell it. It stinks of garlic. Little carbohydrate storage. It takes a couple of seconds to forage. That's amazing. This plant here is another one I've been looking for. Pig nut. I know that it's pig nut because of the white flowers but also because of these leaves. Is that it straight away? Jackpot. Took about three seconds. So apparently you can just... Yeah that's the nicest thing I've picked so far. So this is a little cluster of burdock plants and below my feet supposedly are the tubers which hold all the carbohydrate starchy content that I need for food. That doesn't look like much but that is food. This is good fun. It's like when you have a feel down you're like oh oh keeps going. Wild burdock tubers. That was like what 25 minutes? So this is our haul of edible safe foods. So here we've got some wild garlic which is kind of like scallions or spring onions. Pig nut here. Tiny little tubers. We've got some nettle tops. Leafy green ground elder which would be like our salad. Side salad to our other salad. The main bulk of our calories and the meal will be made up of these burdock tubers which will kind of act like our potato or sweet potato. Quite a big amount of food here for a minimal amount of effort really. This simple meal could see you through a tough situation if you were in dire straits. However despite the food being safe and full of nutritious calories I wasn't exactly winning any Michelin stars. It's tough. It's extremely bitter and it just tastes of plant. Obviously in a real survival situation you wouldn't complain. Wow it's pretty stringy. It's pretty uh what's the word? It tastes like crap. If you could cook this stuff up however not only would you unlock more of the calories it would likely taste better too. So I set about making fire. We're going to do two different methods here. One Bear Grylls style and one more Ramir style. They're sizzling up nicely. And in with the garlic. So I actually just brushed this lemon just over there. Looks a bit like a shoe. Here we go. Let's have a go. Way way better. That fried garlic though. It's all right. I could eat it. Bitterness is gone and so is the harsh texture. I'm not going to get a Michelin star for this but it's more palatable. There's more available calories because it's cooked. It's easier to digest and it's hot. Job done. Look it's entered the clean plate club. So you can stay well fed in the wilderness even if you suck at fishing if you know what you're looking for. If you want just a taste of the wilderness but you don't want to take on the potential danger of picking something incorrect and getting poisoned then you should try cooking over a wood fired grill. I kind of got into this after cooking in the forest and it's a lot of fun. If you want to do it right then check out this course from Skillshare that shows you how to build a fire specifically for cooking. How to prep meat and vegetables and how to actually grill food rustic style without destroying it like I usually do. This is one of more than 29,000 other classes delivered by people who are not only experts in their field but excel at teaching. That means you don't have to worry about crappy audio, confusing instructions. You can just learn what you need quickly and get back to doing. Perhaps you want to better yourself this summer or maybe you want to learn a new skill for work. Where Skillshare really excels is when you have a project where you need to learn multiple different things quickly. I used Skillshare classes in the past to learn JavaScript, Audition and Illustrator to create my own web game. I also have three classes on Skillshare that you can take too. How to solve the Rubik's Cube the easiest way, a beginner's guitar course and a class that shows you how to optimise your learning process and provide you strategies to avoid giving up on new projects. Skillshare's annual subscription is less than 10 bucks a month but my viewers can get two months for free by using the link in the description. And by using that link you'll be helping to support the show. Thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this episode and thanks to you for watching. I'll see you next time. Peace.